Assessments and knowledge checks are central to any eLearning course. Good questions have the power to make the learning experience memorable and successful. They help prepare, reinforce, and evaluate. But good questions are also hard to come by. Creating questions is often a tedious and complicated process. It involves ‘too many cooks’—subject matter experts, instructional designers, vendors. It consumes a lot of time and effort; and in the end you’re left wondering if the result is truly worth the investment you put in for question creation—or whether you’re working hard for no good reason. You’re not alone, and we have a quick guide to help you out.
Here are a few signs you might want to look for, to examine whether you are going about question creation inefficiently:
- You often hear your Subject Matter Experts(SMEs) and Instructional Designers(IDs) say that they are waiting for the other; and
- Your questions are going through numerous review-rework cycles
You often hear your SMEs and IDs say that they are waiting for the other.
The process of creating questions is often a collaboration between SMEs and IDs. SMEs provide the questions and the IDs integrate them in the eLearning content, or the IDs create the questions; and SMEs review and approve them.
Whichever approach you follow, it inevitably involves an element of dependency between the ID and the SME. And dependencies create bottlenecks. At some point in the process, either the SME or the ID is forced to wait idly by, while the other completes their part. Instructional designers and subject matter experts are two of your most valuable resources; their time is extremely expensive.
If your question-generation process ends up squandering valuable time of SMEs and IDs; if either of them is left waiting for long periods for inputs they need to do their job, something isn’t right.
Your questions are going through numerous review-rework cycles.
SMEs are the ultimate authority in their field. They have very specific expectations when it comes to the questions they want to ask on their content. Instructional designers who create questions on SME-generated content are not always privy to the SMEs’ perspective and expectations. So when the questions go to the SMEs for review, they are unhappy with what they get, and end up redoing the questions entirely. Or worse, they send it back to the IDs for rework, and the whole cycle begins anew.
This review-rework cycle is quite taxing, and inevitably leaves you with production delays and unforeseen additional costs.
Whether for these reasons or any other – the questions in your eLearning take a lot of time to come through, and sometimes still fail to live upto expectations. As a result, after going through the entire process of eLearning development, you have to go back and create new questions all over again.
Toward a solution
Have you ever experienced any of these challenges? If any of the two warning signs sound familiar, it may be time to rethink your approach to question-creation, and find a more efficient solution.
You may find what you are looking for in Quillionz, an intelligent question-creation platform, powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Language (ML) technology. Quillionz enables you to create quality assessment questions for your eLearning courses in a fraction of the time it takes you today. It is perfect if you are looking for questions that ask your learners to identify and recall specific entities or key words, define key terms, and describe key ideas encountered in the content. Quillionz can also create questions that evaluate your learners’ ability to explain causal relationships based on explicitly stated reasoning and cite examples of general ideas expressed in the content. However, it is not suited to create higher-order questions that evaluate the learners’ ability to draw parallels or comparison or explain implicit themes and concepts in the content.
Using Quillionz is as easy as this: Upload your content to the Quillionz platform. Once you do, Quillionz’ powerful algorithms automatically create questions (and question ideas) based on your content, which you can then curate and publish. With the fast turnaround time, the dependencies and bottlenecks will become non-existent. Your SMEs will only have to review questions created by Quillionz. No more extensive rework resulting in delays and higher costs. Quillionz finds the perfect synergy between human expertise and technology to make your question-creation process faster and more efficient. Click here to sign up to Quillionz and try it for yourself.
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